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Introduction To Spatial Archaeology
Introduction To Spatial Archaeology
WENDY ASHMORE: the range of archaeological pursuits that focus on study of the
spatial aspects of the archaeological record. These pursuits certainly do not
constitute a separable "field," but, rather, a set of perspectives on studying ancient
societies and cultures, emphasizing position, arrangement, and orientation, and
examined at a range of scales: from individual buildings or monuments, caches, and
burials, to settlements, landscapes, and regions. Architecture and the built
environment, generally, are only a part of the whole, and discussion of them here
highlights their two-dimensional aspects or plan view.
David Leonard Clarke (1937–76),
Fellow at Peterhouse Colege, Cambridge; Analytical Archaeology (1967),
Spatial Archaeology (1977); heaviliy influenced European archaeology in the
1970s. It demonstrated the importance of systems theory, quantification, and
scientific reasoning in archaeology, and drew ecology, geography, and
comparative anthropology firmly within the ambit of archaeology.
For Clarke, the integrations and flows are mainly looked from the economic
perspective and can be revealed by the locational analysis and spatial theories
from economy, architecture, physics, stochastic analysis and anthropology. The
major attractiveness of this approach was its potential for discivering PATTERNS
(regular modes of behaviour) of economic human behaviour as spatially
organized. Another advantage was its formal nature and language which
enabled a series of quantitative and computer analyses.
An important base for such analyses was the underlying concept of human rational
behaviour in decision-making processes. Human behaviour was considerd as
the one that continually tends tended towards increased efficiency (MIN-MAX).
All spatial structures are the products of non-random human decisions and are
mirrored in repeated regularities. It is these regularities which are the principal
study object of spatial archaeology.
Rationalist theories of space: economic, ecosystemic theories
Latices model
Latices model
Thiessen
polygons
Distributions: random, clustered, uniform
Nearest neighbour
analysis
Dran 0,5 A
N
A= area
N= number of
measurements
4. Calculate nearest
neighbour coeffiocient
(Rn):
Dobs
Rn Dran
Hierarchical models:
- central places
Rank-size
rule
=
larger
enthropy